THE BROWN OR COMMON RAT 629 
tended by their mother alone, who will carry them out of reach 
of danger, like other rodents, in her mouth.1. An instance is 
recorded of a female, caught in a trap by one forefoot, gathering 
a nest of grass together for her six newly-born young.’ 
Space does not permit a description of the various methods 
of rat-catching,’ which, as mentioned on p. 583, is an art” 
of quite respectable antiquity. Black Rats or Common Rats, 
according to the period, figure quite frequently in Acts of 
Parliament, churchwardens’ accounts, parish registers, and other 
documents. 
Rats are popularly supposed to desert in a body a sinking 
ship,* or a building, when any ruinous injury exists in the 
masonry. There seems to be no definite evidence of these 
supposed facts, but unquestionably the movements or migra- 
tions of rats are largely governed by questions of food supply. 
One generally supposes that rats find their way about by 
the exercise in an acute degree of the ordinary mammalian 
senses of sight, touch, hearing, and smell, but some experiments 
recently undertaken in the biological laboratory of Chicago® 
suggest that they possess a special motor sense of which human 
beings can have little, if any, cognisance, being independent of 
sight, smell, or hearing. The whiskers are an important, 
but not an essential, factor, since, although disturbed temporarily 
by the removal of the whiskers, the rats were forty-eight hours 
after the removal perfectly capable of finding their way about 
without them. 
Rats make very attractive and amusing pets.° As shown 
above (p. 617) most, if not all, of the existing domestic breeds 
1 Eight young were seen thus transported by E. Cowley, Fze/d, 18th March 1911, 
538; Steele Elliot, Journ. Birmingham Nat. Hist. and Phil, Soc., March to April 
1896, ii., 17, Saw mouse-sized young similarly transported. 
2 A. B. Hemsworth, Zoologis#, 1848, 2132. 
3 In addition to the works of Smith and Swaine, cited on pp. 583-584, see 
Matthew’s Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher, 1898; H. C. Barkley’s Studies 
in the Art of Rat-catching; James Rodwell’s The Rat: its History and Destructive 
Character; Frank Buckland’s essay on Rats, doc. cit. supra; and other works, 
4 See quotation from The Tempest, at p. 578 (Terminology). 
5 Field, 27th June 1908, 1117. 
_ © Perhaps tamed in Japan first, v7de Bingley, 253. Some of the Japanese tame 
these animals, and teach them to perform many entertaining tricks; and thus 
instructed, they are exhibited as a show for the diversion of the people (Kaempfer’s 
Japan, i, 126). 
